Marlon and Jake explore why we're so eager to revisit the worlds of our favorite stories, asking whether great characters are better left where their authors left them—or if there's value in imagining what came before or after. Tune in as they unpack the appeal of sequels, the pitfalls of origin stories, and why some fictional worlds are more powerful when they remain a mystery.

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• A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon
• Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis
• Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding
• The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Lost Horizon by James Hilton
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Little Men by Louisa May Alcott
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Big Blonde by Dorothy Parker
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Marlon and Jake dive into the world of dystopian fiction, unpacking what truly makes a dystopia—and whether some of the genre’s biggest ideas hold up under closer scrutiny. Along the way, they discuss why some dystopias feel more believable than others, how our understanding of these stories changes over time, and the real-world parallels that make them resonate long after the final page. Tune in as they explore how history, power, and human nature shape the worlds we imagine.

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• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
• The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
• The Last Man by Mary Shelley
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
• Pilgermann by Russell Hoban 
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy 
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Pincher Martin by William Golding
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Welcome back for a new season! Marlon and Jake catch up on what they’ve been reading, writing, and working on, including Marlon’s new novel, and explore the books they return to when it’s time to create. They discuss the stories that inspire rather than intimidate, the surprising value of giving up on a book, and the writers they revisit to clear the cobwebs from their minds. Tune in to hear how reading shapes their creative process, from finding the right voice to discovering what makes great dialogue.

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• “A Trifle from Life” by Anton Chekhov
• Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
• The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
• “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway
• The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
• War Music by Christopher Logue
• The Odyssey by Homer
• The Oresteia by Aeschylus
• Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
• Maurice by E. M. Forster
• Ernesto by Umberto Saba
• Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
• New Hampshire by Robert Frost
• In Parenthesis by David Jones
• Civil War by Lucan

In the final episode of the season, Marlon and Jake weigh in on their favorite vacation reads, including the ones they started but never finished. Tune in to find out which classic novels Jake took to the beach and which ones Marlon says should have been thrown in the ocean. 

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• The Goodbye Look by Ross McDonald
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• Chances by Jackie Collins
• The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• The Golden Bowl by Henry James
• The Ambassadors by Henry James
• Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
• Pronto by Elmore Leonard
• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
• Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert
• The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot by Robert Arthur, Jr.
• Persuasion by Jane Austen

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times—it was school. In this episode, Marlon and Jake discuss books where school is the setting or going to school is central to the plot. They debate which authors got school right and which got school wrong, what makes an inspiring teacher, and what the closed universe of a schoolyard or college campus can feel like. Tune in to hear Marlon and Jake reminisce over their own college experiences and what they were like as students.

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• Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes
• The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
• Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
• Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
• The Crime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles
• Look back in Anger by John Osborne
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
• Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner
• Love Story by Erich Segal
• The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
• Stoner by John Williams
• Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
• The Corn is Green by Emlyn Williams

In this episode, Marlon and Jake talk about cities in books. Books set in memorable cities, books set in cities you're glad you've never been to and books where the city itself is nearly a character. They talk about the specificity of London of the 19th century British novel, the New York novel, entirely fictional cities in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and don’t miss Marlon’s personal experience with Bloomsday in Dublin!

Subscribe to our River-herd newsletter for sneak peeks of our upcoming books, free giveaways, and exclusive content. https://sites.prh.com/riverhead-reader-newsletterUlysses by James Joyce 

• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Portrait of the Artist by James Joyce
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe 
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
• The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
• Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz
• Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 
• Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust 
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
• Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice 
• Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Young Unicorns by Madeleine L’Engle

In this episode, Marlon and Jake talk about the bad characters we’re not meant to like but do and the good characters we’re meant to like but annoy us. From Dracula to Daisy Buchanan to Oliver Twist and Bambi, the good-to-evil spectrum is vast and no character is safe from commentary. Tune in to find out which classic villain the duo unanimously hate, and which villain gives Marlon the chills and scares Jake to this day. 

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• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
• A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
• The Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser
• Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes
• King Solomon’s Mines by Sir H. Rider Haggard
• Raiders of the Lost Arc by Campbell Black
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys
• Bambi by Felix Salten
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Railway Children by E. Nesbit
• Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
• The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• Emma by Jane Austen
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

This episode, Marlon and Jake discuss a new subject for the podcast: poetry! From epic poems to sonnets to the Romantics poets to contemporary (dead) poets. They ponder over why people don’t read poetry as much as prose and recite, on the spot, lines of poetry that are forever engrained in their memories.

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• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
• War Music by Christopher Logue
• The Gift Outright by Robert Frost
• Emily Dickinson
• W.H. Auden
• T.S. Eliot
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• William Wordsworth
• Rupert Brooke
• John Dunn
• The Spanish Needle by Claude McKay
• The Iliad by Homer
• The Aeneid by Virgil
• Omeros by Derek Walcott
• The Arrivants by Kamau Brathwaite
• Riddyn Ravings (The Mad Woman's Poem) by Jean “Binta” Breeze
• Anne Sexton
• Dr. Maya Angelou
• The Tyger by William Blake
• Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
• Gwendolyn Brooks
• June Jordan
• Audre Lorde
• Toni Morrison
• Ogden Nash
• Dorothy Parker
• Tales From Ovid by Ted Hughes
• Inferno from Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Books assigned in school evoke strong feelings. You either love em’ or you hate em.’ In this episode, Marlon and Jake discuss the books they wished they were assigned in school and the ones they suffered through. Accompanying the books taught in school, there are, of course, the teachers who taught them. A teacher can make or break a book read in school. As a literature teacher (as well as Booker prize winning author), Marlon acknowledges there are some novels assigned in school that you have to work to understand that are really good, but sometimes those novels are not good and if it weren’t for being assigned in school, we wouldn’t still be reading it.

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• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Republic by Plato
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• Washington Square by Henry James
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
• The Aspern Papers byHenry James
• The Ambassadors by Henry James
• Daisy Miller by Henry James
• Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• The Bondsman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts
• Guerillas by VS Naipaul
• Miguel Street by VS Naipaul
• A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
• A House for Mr. Biswas by VS Naipaul
• Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
• The Godfather by Mario Puzo
• Shogun by James Clavell
• Tia-pan by James Clavell
• King Rat by James Clavell
• Whirlwind by James Clavell
• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
• King Lear by William Shakespeare
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare
• King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
• The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Lady, or the Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton
• The Discourager of Hesitancy by Frank R. Stockton

In this episode, Marlon and Jake weigh in on a question as old as books themselves—can you judge a book by its cover? Spoiler alert: the answer is yes! They discuss good books with bad covers and bad books with good covers, cover art trends (*cough* the woman facing away), books that were recommended to them, and books they read because of peer pressure. Tune in to hear Marlon and Jake opine the myriad ways we judge books.

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• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
• The Latecomers by Anita Brookner
• The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort
• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask by Dr. David R. Reuben
• Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
• Ancient Evening by Norman Mailer
• Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
• The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
• Ballad of a Sad Café by Carson McCullers
• Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
• Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
• The Hound of the Baskerville by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• The Night of January 16th by Ayn Rand
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
• Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
• Jamacia Inn by Daphne Du Maurier
• Don’t Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Stoner by John Williams
• One is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann
• Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
• Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins
• Chances by Jackie Collins
• Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
• Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
• Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner
• Butterfield 8 by John O’Hara
• A Rage to Live by John O’Hara
• Grendel by John Gardner
• Mickelsson’s Ghosts by John Gardner
• October Light by John Gardner
• Freddy’s Book by John Gardner
• The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster
• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
• Howards’ End by E.M. Forster
• Maurice by E.M. Forster
• Soldier’s Pay by William Faulkner
• Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor
• Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

Marlon and Jake are back! And they’re catching up on the dead authors they’ve read since they last spoke—some of which they praise, others they don’t. From comparing Nella Larson’s Passing to the Netflix film, to discussing unsettling stories that linger with you, they cover a lot of literary ground. They also weigh in on longstanding debates like whether they read the book or watch the movie adaption first and the difference between horror and terror. Tune in for the witty book banter you know and love. 

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• The Letters of Thom Gunn by Thom Gunn
• Passing by Nella Larsen 
• A View From a Hill by Montague Roads James
• The Turn of The Screw by Henry James
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelly 
• The Birds by Daphne Du Maurier
• Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
• The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris 
• The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
• Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson
• Airships by Barry Hannah 
• Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac
• Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 
• Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
• Hell House by Richard Matheson
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson 
• Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring